Utilizing search engines has become common place for most consumers over the past decade. What once was a technology that only scientists and technologists employed to search information, is now being conquered by toddlers. According to comScore's March 2012 search engine rankings, Google® sites lead the U.S. market in March with a 66.4% market share. There were 18.4 billion searches conducted in March with Google® ranking first with 12.2 billion searches.
Consumers are craving information from “What does a hippopotamus look like?” to “What are my legal rights during a criminal case?” Search engines like Google® and Yahoo!® have the world as their consumers with a wealth of documents, websites, blogs, and content available for searching. However, the algorithms running the worldwide search engines fall short if a user is trying to find a specific, current answer about a particular issue, for example, a legal issue. For instance, if a user were to type in “fmla disability legal issue” into Google® search engine, the results are tailored towards explaining the acronym, FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act), and the information with which an individual needs to be aware. Consequently, this information does not help a professional, such as an employment attorney, keep up to date on the current legal awareness of the FMLA and provide information regarding questions the attorney may have about the legal issues surrounding FMLA to enable the attorney to provide legal advice. In other words, worldwide search engines cast a virtual wide net to gather as much information as possible relating to a user query. This information is then served up to the consumer for him/her to sift through to see if those documents answer his/her question. Unfortunately, professionals do not have the time, or usually the patience, to sift through various search results. A professional wants specific information quickly, efficiently and most of all located at the top of the results webpage.
Accordingly, the present inventors identified a need for improving a search result using segment constraints.